A MASH Unit for Ailing Sea Mammals

SAUSALITO, California — The Marine Mammal Center — located on the site of a Cold War-era missile silo north of San Francisco, within sight of the Pacific Ocean at the end of a military road — has been doing cutting edge veterinary science since 1975.

Then, the vets were working out of shipping containers and keeping animals in kiddie pools. Now, after treating thousands of animals, one of the nation’s premiere seal and sea lion hospitals has a new, $32 million facility purpose-built for saving lives. We visited the brand new center when it opened to the public this month.

“You’re not going to find another marine mammal rehab facility like this,” said Jeff Boehm, a veterinarian and the center’s executive director. “We’ve borrowed from the technologies of aquariums, from other laboratories, veterinary facilities and the expertise and knowledge of the folks doing this work here.”

In the next 10 photos, we take you on a tour of the facilities, from the water treatment tech to the fish milkshakes, that help rescued animals get their strength back.

Despite the happiness surrounding the opening of the center, a continuous onslaught of malnourished California sea lions is giving the new facility an early test. Up to a dozen sea lions a day are being brought to the center in advanced stages of starvation. Few of them make it back out to sea, no matter what the vets do.

That’s a bitter pill to swallow for a facility that saves more than half the animals it treats. On the day we visited, postmortems were being performed on the bodies of three sea lions. The work, grisly to watch, is nevertheless open to the public.

“It’s not always that there are three necropsies going on concurrently, thankfully,” Boehm said. “But right now we’re swamped and we’re puzzling through that to best understand what’s going on and what the implications are for that species.”

The research could also help scientists understand what the sea lion die-off might mean for other species, even humans.

“More and more we’re understanding things through working with sea lions and seals that givs us insights into ocean health, which is something we rely upon as well,” Boehm said.

The centerpiece of the research center is the series of pens that hold animals while they are treated. Most have relatively small square pools a few feet deep. The animals rest and recuperate poolside, while they are diagnosed and treated by the vets on staff.

“If you or I were to go into see our physician and blood was drawn, all the basics of a physical exam, all the same components are here: complete blood count, serum chemistry profile, the microbiology, the parasitology,” Boehm said.

Unlike an aquarium, the Marine Mammal Center is a hospital first and an educational center second. Visitors can’t get that close to the animals and even the press is kept a safe distance from the animals’ pools.

The new center was designed with energy conservation and production in mind, as evidenced by the 26-kilowatt solar panel array that supplies more than 10 percent of the complex’s electricity needs. The panels sit to the south of animal pools, too, providing them shade from the afternoon sun.

The new buildings’ modern accoutrements and technological sophistication is a welcome change for the staffers and the animals.

“Before the rebuild, the staff was working out of old shipping containers and modular buildings,” said Tony Promessi, director of life support.

At the back of the marine research facility, standard dog crates of various sizes are kept at the ready for rescue and transport missions. The crates can be loaded into trucks or specially outfitted cargo vans to transport animals in need of help along 600 miles of California’s coastline. Most of the animals the center deals with are small enough to handle without too much specialized equipment.

“We have vehicles moving up and down the coast this time of year all day long … transferring animals, transferring equipment,” Boehm said.

The animals are fed a special diet of herring and electrolyte milkshakes. The raw fish get pushed one-by-one into a meat grinder. The resulting hash is mixed with a Gatorade-like substance and blended together. If this sounds tasty to you, the recipe is 1 kilogram of ground herring for every 1,000 milliliters of electrolyte solution.

The delicious milkshake is loaded into large syringes attached to plastic pipes. The pipe goes down the seal’s throat and the syringe’s plunger gets pressed, pushing the food into the animal’s stomach. The recipe and presentation might not win you any points on Iron Chef, but it’s just what the animals need to recover.

The complex is built atop the site of an old Nike missile silo. The underground bunkers that used to house anti-aircraft missiles now provide a secure space for the center’s tissue specimen archive and wastewater treatment facilities.

Still, some remnants of its Cold War provenance remain. Here, we see the door to the bomb detonation control room of the old facility. The walls of the room are about a foot thick. The metal door itself is several times the width of a standard door.

The silo site provides a perfect spot for the center’s highly engineered water treatment system.

“It’s basically a miniature wastewater treatment plant,” said Tony Promessi, who manages the facilities. “If you compare it to what a zoo or an aquarium has, they may have a half dozen animals in a large 200,000 gallon exhibit. Here we can have as many as 200 plus animals [in the same amount of water]. That’s a lot of waste, so we’re aggressively trying to keep up water quality all the time.”

They run the water through a variety of systems that have been linked together to provide lots of water treatment in a relatively small amount of space. Here, you see the sand filtration tanks.

The facility’s water treatment system is largely automated. A system of sensors and controllers ensure that the various pieces of water treatment machinery work in concert. And if changes need to be made, Promessi can log into the system with his iPhone and take care of business.

Although clad in rubber coveralls instead of scrubs, the workers at the Marine Mammal Research Center are every inch health-care providers.

“We’re a hospital at our core,” Boehm said. “We see about 600 animals, 600 patients every year. Of those, we release about 55 percent of them. Slightly more than half get well, get fit, and get back into the oceans.”

The center depends heavily on volunteers, with around 800 of them pitching in over the course of a year. They are always looking for more people.